Only A Game

Listen Live

Next

On Being

On Being with Krista Tippett takes up the big questions with scientists and theologians, artists and teachers -- some you know and others you'll love to meet. Each week a new discovery about the immensity of our lives.

ADL: Hate crimes on the rise

June 12, 2009

The day after a security guard was murdered at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., an expert on white supremacist violence was in Philadelphia to brief local law enforcement officials on what she calls a resurgence in extremist violence.

The day after a security guard was murdered at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., an expert on white supremacist violence was in Philadelphia to brief local law enforcement officials on what she calls a resurgence in extremist violence.

Listen:
[audio: 090611lfadl.mp3]

Marilyn Mayo is co-director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. She says the Holocaust Museum killing and the recent murder of a doctor by an anti-abortion extremist are not the only incidents in which extremists moved from ideology to action.

Mayo: You had in April Richard Pobloskwy who was a white supremacist and anti-Semite who shot 3 Pittsburgh police officers. And you also had in Massachusetts a white supremacist who raped a woman and shot another woman and killed a man who were all immigrants from Cape Verde. And he was planning on carrying out a killing spree against Jews and non-whites.

Mayo was invited to the city by the local ADL to do a series of briefings. She says many of the supremacists and extremists feel the country’s cultural and ethnic identity is being threatened by an African American President, an influx of immigrants, and the prospect of gun control legislation.